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Editorial

Imagine storing all the computational information produced in the world in just one year: you would have a pile of DVDs able to reach the Moon and back. How about all the data collected since the beginning of the computer era? The quantity is so huge that traditional units of measurement cannot cope. For this reason a few years ago computer scientists started talking about “Big Data”, referring to the gathering, formatting, analysing and manipulating of a massive amount of digital information.
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During the spectacular financial market crashes and the resulted recession, there has been renewed assault on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and its theoretical basis—mainstream economics. George Soros announced Oct. 2009 that he will put 50 million dollars over ten years to establish an “Institute for New Economic Thinking”.
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The problems that some users have experienced uploading papers or registering with Econophysics Forum have been fixed. Many thanks for your patience while we tracked down the source of this problem!
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Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing. Rockets fly to the moon, energy is extracted from minute changes of atomic mass without major havoc, global positioning satellites help millions of people to find their way home. What is the flagship achievement of economics, apart from its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch?
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Last November we had an exciting gathering of many people who are/were
physicists or other natural scientists but are working in finance, insurance
and related sectors -- an occasion built upon the so-called econophysics community that brought together both academics and practitioners in an
intimate encounter.
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Econophysics Forum is now 10 years old — and though the old interface has served its time honourably, it is well due an update. From the beginning our aim was to create a platform to foster and facilitate cooperation and communication among researchers in our field. The huge advances in web development and technology since then mean that it is now possible to create functionality that perhaps could not even be dreamed of in 1998. We have begun our overhaul with an update of the graphical interface and a cleaning-out and streamlining of website code, without affecting its functionality. This is however only the first step on a longer journey to redevelop Econophysics Forum as a genuinely collaborative platform.
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Economics and physics are two disciplines that, contrary to widespread perceptions, have significant common agendas. Shame, then, that the professionals don't do more to recognize the fact.
After hearing a talk on the application of physics to the social sciences, a physicist in a notoriously traditional department was heard to mutter that it was all very well but it wasn't 'real physics'. It was an article of faith to him that many-body theories in physics could not be applied to animate objects.
Now that it seems clear that bacteria, locusts and even road traffic undergo types of dynamic phase transition, this objection is hard to sustain.
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As if it were yesterday, Econophysics Forum web site actually is seven years old. Around the summer of 1998 a handful of my colleagues who later to be labelled as ’econophysicists’ were wondering how to tap the then new WWW phenomenon to foster the fledging community. The dream was to have a kind of ‘virtual institute’, enabling scientists working on the margins of the traditional disciplines and institutions to mingle and work together. Seven years is a long period, especially in the Information Age. The original vision didn’t bear out completely, but it was an interesting experiment leveraging then primitive web technologies and to have gathered a consistent crowd among the physicists and other scholars in the interdisciplinary domain.
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